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title: Story (Costly) Magic V1

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title: Story (Costly) Magic V1
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# FORMATTING NOTES
Ctrl + f these 
?? = Confusion, clarification needed
!? = Design uncertainty
# Story (Costly) Magic V1

As we move into the Mu sector, mechanical magic systems become a necessity, as it is canon that people can use magic as we enter areas with thick leylines (?? Or can we cast magic with other things? Plot hole: If non-magical items can be transmuted into magic \[I got the impression this can be done by the fact magic is only restricted by the law of conservation\], why has noone done magic so far?). However, current spells are both 1. Completely free to use and 2. Nuts as hell

This can be solved by introducing a more lore-friendly, and less insane version of magic, which I will dub "Costly", or "Story" magic, based off their restriction by the law of conservation/their relevance to the story. By making this magic available to the crew, we can close a potential plot hole of individuals being unable to use magic, contrary to the lore.

## Goals

- Introduce a lore-friendly and semi-balanced form of magic usable by the crew that **will not overtake traditional game mechanics**, or **will interact with traditional mechanics** in a way that doesn't make them the "meta".
    - This is partially accomplished by the reliance on "leylines", which I will get into later.
    - **THIS MAY CHANGE LATER.** As we transition into Mu, leyline intensity WILL increase and magic WILL become more relevant. As it currently stands, the overall leyline intensity is notably low, to the point where most of the expensive spells aren't even usable.
- Allow players to make their characters a little more "special" by giving them inherent, lore-adjacent abilities
- Progress the lore

## Principles of magic design
1. **Limited resources**: (?? Lore adjacency? Do note that even if this against lore, non-limited resources such as unlimited transmutation would destabilize the design principle of this document) Mana is generated and procured on demand. The only (easily accessable and significant) form of magical "storage" are leylines, which cannot be manipulated (in most cases) and recharge at a steady, slow pace.
    - Imagine a medical doctor with a full belt of stock tools, and another doctor with "healing hands", a theoretical "costly" healing-attuned (Attunements will be discussed later, and will not be in V1) spell that requires 100 mana to heal 20 combined brute/burn off someone. With leylines of 500 mana capacity, this doctor can heal 100 combined brute/burn - but will then have to wait for the slow recharge of the leylines before using it again. This is assuming other people aren't using the leylines for themselves - which will even further damage the utility of these spells.
    - This will result in the more traditional medical doctor having lower "burst" effectiveness, but in the long run, being both more consistant in their ability, and more effective.
        - Not every spell is limited in this way - if the user is skilled in transmuting (*??* Who is able to transmute energy/matter to mana? What forms of transmutation would be easier or harder?)energy/matter into mana, they may cast low-cost spells, albiet at great cost, as transmutations often supply far less mana than leylines
        - Ex. 100% stamina damage provides, say, 20 mana, full to starving provides 70, and 10% blood volume provides 10 (blood-attuned) mana.
    - This (somewhat) prevents magic from overtaking the consistancy of traditional mechanics. However, as leyline intensity increases, it may be come inevitable that the mana pool will become deep enough and refill quick enough for magic to become competitive.
    - **Resource availability will vary.** Leylines have a varying amount of intensity and storage/recharge rate, which is generated every round. Certain rounds, no leylines will generate at all, making magic, outside of transmutation (??, !? Should transmutation magic require a small amount of latent energy to power it?), unusable. In other rounds, the station will enter a truely monumental leyline, opening a gargantuan mana pool to draw from, making magic not only superior to traditional mechanics, but potentially obsoleting them.
    - As designated by Wollywog, all beings have a intrinsic mana capacity, 
2. **Honor system**: To encourage creativity and do away with the balance deadlock servers often face, players must be entrusted to not abuse balance flaws these spells may create.
3. **Limitations fill the gaps**: These are not meant to completely disrupt the balance of the gameplay flow. Players are encouraged to pick, construct, or make up, via roleplay, limitations that cover their chosen spell's balance flaws.
    - Imagine a theoretical spell: "Phase-shift", which allows the user to shift exactly seven tiles away, through walls, befoer phasing in, with a significant cost (200 out of a leyline's 500 mana). This could be easily abused, because you could easily become uncatchable with a spell like this in certain scenarios (notably, a scenario that allows them to retreat for the time it takes for the leyline to recharge \[Note: This can be countered by simply using magic to drain the leyline\]. Thus, players must be entrusted to **come up with a reason** that they, for some reason, cannot perfectly use the spell to evade captors. Either that, or a mechanical limitation should be put in place (preferably, one the user may pick).
4. **Lore-adjacency**: Absolutely no spells or mechanics introduced should contradict existing lore.
5. **Design flexibility in spells**: Not all spells must abide by things such as reliance on leylines. There must be flexible design, as magic is inheritely very diverse (?? Confirm?)

## Leylines
Leylines are, as stated in lore, the veins of magic throughout the galaxy. This is the **primary source** of magic for all those that cast magic, and all spells, with a few exceptions.

- Leylines serve as the global mana pool accessable by every single entity playing the game. To simulate the fact they are sporadically placed, leylines, upon generation, are given a random "intensity" that represents their distance from the station, and thus, their effect. After all, how can you tap into their magic when they're light years away?

- No one creature has exclusive access to a leyline - if one person drains a leyline, it drains for everyone else, and all people have access to the same leylines outside of odd circumstances.

In V1, there will only be one leyline at any given moment, although in the future, leylines may spawn in batches. (!? Idea: Give people the ability to use only a specific leyline? Ex. Leyline 1 (Mana 500), leyline 2 (Mana 300). It's not a bad idea, it doesn't violate limited resources, but it might take some of the chaos out of it, if, say, a command member can reserve leyline 2 for command or something. of course, it'd be untracable, so get fucked.) 

## Catalysts
Preforming magic without a catalyst (held item) incurs a 5x mana cost penalty.

# Ideas for future versions

## Attunement
Mana is often associated with an "element" as shown in lore. These "elements" often also correspond to a moral and law/chaos "alignment".
- Mana, and mana *sources*, both have an attunement "value" ranging from negative infinity to positive infinity. Mana derived from a given source will inherit it's attunement values.
- Spells, as well, will have an attunement value. The mana cost of a spell will be reduced by the level at which incoming mana is attuned to the spell's attunements.
    - Ex. Imagine a spell named "Blood rain" that has the following attunements and attributes.
        - Water: +1.7
        - Blood: +3.2
        - Holy: -4.3
        - Mana cost: 50
    - Now imagine the user has found a source of mana with the following attributes (Such as, from blood transmutation).
        - Water: +0.3
        - Blood: +1
        - Amount: 20
    - The effective amount of mana would be increased to ~50 (!? Math undetermined, this may not actually be how it ends up being)
    - Now imagine a source of mana as follows
        - Holy: +100
        - Amount: 200
    - The effective amount of mana would be **reduced to ~50**, despite the fact that consuming this "50 mana" is actually consuming 200 real mana.

(!? Moral/Chaos alignment effects undetermined, ?? what do these even do to magic, to mana? What do they really mean?)

## Catalysts
More shit will be put on them.
